Butterflies
by Spikey44
Summary: Butterflies are beautiful, fragile and made only for fair weather. She has always liked them. In many ways she has found that men are very like butterflies. Easy to become enamoured of and they do not last. A series of short reflections on love and death.
1. Chapter 1

Butterflies

Silent Voices

He knows that today is the day he dies.

They both agree that there is a certain irony that it is his heart, and its failings, that will kill him.

She had thought his lifestyle would be the death of him, he remarked that he had expected venereal disease; Which, they both agreed, was more or less the same thing.

He is young to die. Even for his kind, such a short lived race.

It does not seem quite fair, and what a strange thing for she to use such a word, that he should be cut down while still in his prime.

He quips that his greatest grievance is that he will not live long enough to enjoy his own infamy.

Though, he adds with a strained smile that does not quite hide the chasm of fear in his eyes, at least he will leave behind a handsome corpse.

She does not say anything as she looks on his ravaged, gaunt face. He is no longer handsome. Death is never beautiful.

When the pain leaves him short of breath he attempts to order her to leave him.

She does not know if it is vanity or a misguided attempt at chivalry that motivates him in this request.

She refuses him.

They both agree that this is something she has rarely ever done in all their years together.

Happy years.

She wonders if he really knows what that means to her.

They both know that there will be others after him. She will only be alone under her skin, yet in future years others will walk at her side.

He diverts his mind from pondering his imminent demise by setting mandates in regards to these future companions.

They must be witty and erudite, he instructs her, as you like a man with a clever tongue, he adds with a saucy wink.

And, he continues mischievously, they should be none too bright, as it would not do to have her 'new man' figure out too soon that she was the power behind the throne, as it were.

After all, it had taken him twenty years to figure that out.

They must be adventurous, because a woman such as she deserved to be kept constantly entertained.

He pauses for a moment as the pain takes him; she watches the light and vitality stutter behind his eyes.

Soon there will be no more humorous reflections, no wicked and criminal thoughts percolating behind those almost sleepy bedroom eyes.

Your new man, he tells her when he gains his breath, can be honourable, dare he say- noble- at times, but – and this he stresses very firmly, not beyond reason as he will not be out-done in this regard.

And she must not rest on her laurels either.

He expects her to mourn him as befit their professions and their natures by taking up with another as soon as he is cold in his grave.

His laughter turns to coughs and, almost involuntarily, he reaches out to grip her hand in his failing, numbed grip.

This is taking too long, he grates out frustrated. If he has to go at all he would rather it is over and done with quickly.

She says nothing, her thoughts drifting to another request made and refused.

Terrified of the prospect of a long and protracted death he had, in a moment of weakness, asked her to help him find a faster way out.

One last daring escape from a painful death, he mocked.

He asked too much of her, she had said. If he would choose his own way out, she would not stop him, but she will not be responsible for his death.

If he had asked her to join him in his quick death, that would have been different. But he expects her to live once he is gone.

Despite his words the denouement draws close with ever increasing speed. His words stop, every fibre of his being concentrated in dragging every last shallow breath of air into his lungs.

She hates and praises every tortured inhalation and exhalation.

Each one could be his last, and every successive breath keeps him grounded in his flesh a moment longer.

For all that she is well acquainted with death, for all that she has delivered the killing blow to many a foe, she has never before witnessed death in its every obscene detail, every second transcendent in its agony for both of them.

She does not think she will do it again.

There will be a great many things that she will never do again, once this is over.

As if sensing he has neglected her in his attentions, he resurfaces from deaths shallow waters, turning his head fractionally as he gulps air like a landed fish.

His eyes speak to her in the language of silent voices they have between them.

He tells her, now that the pain has left him and his heart has all but stopped, that he is sorry for her pain, but he did tell her not to stay and watch.

Slow death is hardly an enjoyable spectator sport, after all.

One of his hands rests against his chest, the chest that has not risen in breath and likely never will hence, she touches the back of that hand gently with her fingers, they dance across the rings on his fingers, warm from body heat.

Thank you, she tells him without uttering a word.

Thank you for being my friend.

The pleasure, he replies, was all mine.

And she thinks that she would see the warmth of his smile in his eyes, except that he has gone now, already, and his eyes are fixed and vacant.

The sun is warm on her skin when she ventures outside, the ocean's song a sonorous murmur brushing her ears.

Under a golden birch tree a cloud of butterflies dance in the warm sun and dappled shadows of the late afternoon.

With the stealth and tranquil grace she was blessed with from birth she moves towards that static cloud, inching closer until she is enveloped.

Standing as still and impregnable as the ancient tree; the cloud of multicoloured butterflies dance around her.

Pink and blue.

Green and gold.

The insubstantial fluttering of their feathery wings in her hair feels like the quick, clever fingers of one who will ever more be memory.

Pink and blue; green and gold.

She has no interest or inclination toward tears.

She knows that a Desert Queen, many years happily married with heirs apparent enough for three thrones, will shed covert tears enough to satisfy his vanity.

Pink and blue; green and gold the butterflies, children of the warm sun and carefree days, she knows, they will fall with the first frost.

They are beautiful and fragile and they do not last.

Pink and blue; green and gold.

The butterflies leave her with a last quick kiss of ghostly wings, dancing away on the warm sea breeze.

She looks down at her right hand.

Pink and blue; green and gold

They adorn her fore and index fingers, just as he once wore them, the bands of metal warming against her skin.

She will not mourn him, and she will never forget him.


	2. Chapter 2

_Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers apply to all pieces. I own nothing except these words._

Blood and Ballrooms

They resemble a blizzard of butterflies.

They swirl across the marble floor in a cloud of fine silks and velvet, a kaleidoscope of colours.

The musicians are very good. The dancers are sublime.

She watches them weave and bob and pirouette from partner to partner with chin cupped in one hand until she recalls that this is improper posture for one in her position.

She distains the offers to dance even though she aspires her councillors irritation, she is annoyed too, it is only right her privy councillors should share in that burden.

Her lower back seizes up and her abdomen twists in persistent cramps. She longs for a long hot soak in a warm bath.

She watches the high born dance below her dais with narrowed eyes.

Where were you, she questions one smiling, impeccably groomed noble after another, when I was creeping about the sewers?

Where were you when your country needed you?

Yet this is not her greatest preoccupation.

The ghosts on the ballroom floor hold her attention in vice grip.

For all the people that are in attendance for this grand banquet, so many are missing.

All the guests of honour from the last ball are here no longer, save herself.

The last ball, her wedding fete.

They had danced that night, she and her Prince.

Many of the same nobles who laugh and smile and parade about in their finery before her now, did the self same thing on her wedding night.

How they had cheered when her Prince, in a moment of flamboyant theatrics he was hardly known for, swept her up in his arms and carried her over the threshold of the ballroom towards the sky shuttle waiting to spirit them both away to his kingdom.

So many colours.

She remembers that was her first, vaguely incoherent thought, upon seeing his palace for the first time.

The walls of even the lowest, least significant parts of the citadel were alight with iridescent mosaic tiles.

The walls, the ceilings, the floors, glowed in a rippling veldt of jade and gold leaf, vermillion and indigo to dazzle the eyes of any blushing bride.

The bridal bed was covered in a quilt of crushed flower petals and braziers burned with a sweet, intoxicating aroma that warmed the air as it cast its perfume.

She had been so eager, so willing that night. They had danced so well together she thought that they would do this equally well.

She remembers crying afterward as her blood ruined the beautiful flower strewn golden sheets.

It was not the pain that forced out the tears but the crushing embarrassment that she had somehow failed the big test of womanhood.

She remembers that she barricaded herself in the bathroom, beautifully sculpted in green and blue stone tiles and filigreed peek-a-boo cut-out windows, and would not open the door to the physician called to aid her.

Her blood splattered the oceanic tiles, thick and dark and prophetic.

Only her Prince begging her in broken voice to let him in, promising her that she had done nothing wrong and he should have been more gentle; persuaded her to open the door.

He had promised her that night as she silently, stolidly, worked through the seizing cramps and pain in her abdomen, that he would never hurt her again.

He lied.

The sight of his blue-white corpse shrouded in waxy white flowers, dead in his coffin, hurt her far more. This wound he inflicted on her will never heal.

In the present she rises from her throne and the tide of dancers stills, slowly she descends the steps of her throne and walks into the very centre of the ballroom floor.

The long train of her crimson gown trails across the pure white marble and she likes the contrast, the implicit point she is trying to make to all those smiling sycophants who have never spilled their own blood for their pleasure.

She raises one hand above her head and clicks her fingers.

The Nabradia Taranta if you please.

They are her musicians they will play whatever she tells them to play.

The musicians start up the furious, pounding beat, the fiddle and the drum prominent.

She stamps her feet rhythmically in time with the thunderous, subliminal beat of the music, she pounds out her cramps with each stamp, grinding her heel into the snow white marble.

She will not allow these men and women, those who saw out the occupation in hiding, cloistered away from death and loss and suffering, to hide any longer.

Let the dead hear their jig and, if it pleases them, let them dance at her side.

As she forces her nobles, and oh, yes, they will soon see that they are hers; hers to praise, hers to scorn, in furious, wild abandon, she sees the sparkle of blood on the ballroom floor.

Her blood spilled again.

She aches all over but she will not cease her frenzied dance.

She and her Prince had danced so well together and she knows no other way than this to honour him and those who have departed this mortal coil with him.

She remembers them all in dance and light and colour, and her blood painting the floor of the ballroom floor.


	3. Chapter 3

Chrysalis

Once upon a time there were two brothers and a girl.

The girl was the youngest so she always acted like she was the eldest.

One day, the first day after the Rains and the Giza Plains was still green and sweet smelling with growing things, the elder brother took the girl and his younger brother out to chase butterflies.

They were hunting a special type of butterfly.

The Rainbow Wingtip.

The elder brother told the girl that this butterfly was very rare and only found in this region.

It came from a chrysalis found on the underside of the large cacti flowers that bloomed only after the Rains.

He had to explain to the girl what a chrysalis was. Before then she had not thought to wonder where Butterflies came from.

Caterpillars?

The girl had been so surprised to discover that the beautiful creatures that she so loved to watch flit from one flower to another came from the wriggling, hairy little creatures that ate all her fathers vegetables in the garden.

Lots of the best things in life come from humble beginnings. The elder brother had told her kindly.

You just have to let them grow and be patient.

Hours of fun and frolics on the Giza Plains chasing common variety butterflies and the occasional Giza Bunny, just because, and they finally came across the Rainbow Wingtip.

Oh, but it was lovely.

At first, though, it had looked rather plain.

Larger than the other butterflies that danced in a cloud of pink and blue and yellow and green, the Wingtip was a pale, yellowish white, on first glance.

Only when the sun hit its beating wings does she see the myriad rainbow colours that dance, like a mirage across those sturdy wings.

The girl gasps to see such a wonder and turns to ask the elder boy how did the colours of its wings change so?

Do you like the butterfly? The younger brother asks her eagerly, shall I catch it for you?

Before the girl can say anything the stocky tow-haired younger brother runs off; his big, clumsy hands clapping together like metal shackles as he races into the mist of butterflies.

No!

The girl yelps as the Rainbow Wingtip, too large and too slow to escape with the smaller butterflies is caught in those large hands.

One wing is ripped and the colours fade as the stricken insect spirals to the mossy ground, dead.

The younger brother looks confusedly at his palm, smeared with the dusty sheen of a rainbow.

The older brother scolds his impetuous sibling as the girl starts to cry scooping up the tattered remains and watching, miserably, as the creature crumbles to bits in her hands.

It is years later that the older brother goes to war.

He comes back, and many others, like the girls own brothers, do not. But he is not the same boy who took them butterfly hunting.

The girl and the younger boy go to see his brother who many are calling traitor as their home is filled with foreign men in armour who force the people underground.

It seems to the girl when she looks at the older boy and his dead eyes, his white lips mumbling nonsense about kings and soldiers over and over again, that he is like the butterfly.

Broken, tattered, the magick gone.

The girl always remembers that day on the Plains, even when she becomes part of a much larger fairy tale; it seems to her that the butterfly and its death started the whole thing.

Afterward, when the girl and the boy, whose brother is long dead like the butterfly, return to their home in a ship belonging to dead friends, the girl thinks that if the war was a chrysalis for a new beginning where is the butterfly?

Hasn't she been patient enough?

The girl is only marginally interested when the boy finds a collection of mechanical pits and pieces in the pirate's belongings.

The girl criticises the boy for snooping, shame facedly knowing she did the same thing in the first mates cabin.

When the girl sees the boy reading a book stolen from the pirate's room, she questions him.

He tells her to wait and see.

One day, in a strange foreign land called Bervenia, the girl sees a sparkle of light and colour in the darkling shadows of one of the ruins.

Butterflies.

The girl does not wade in to chase them.

The girl knows there is no point.

The girl turns away from the butterflies, frowning, only to find the boy watching her. There is something cupped in his large hands.

Do you like the butterflies? He asks her with odd solemnity. Would you like one of your own?

The girl opens her mouth, straining for patience, to tell him to leave the butterflies alone.

But the boy has already opened his cupped hands and the girl gets her first look at what he holds within.

I made this for you. The boy tells her bashfully. This one won't break. He adds with an embarrassed smile.

The boy holds in his hands a butterfly made of brass and stained glass.

Its wings, carefully weighted with tiny gloss air rings to make it fly and a wind up key extending from the skinny stalk body, look plain and see-through until the boy winds up the clockwork mechanism.

The girl watches amazed as the clockwork butterfly comes delicately alive in the boy's palm.

Flapping its wings, which the girl now sees are not dull sheets of clear glass, but rainbow prisms of light, holding so many surprises to be discovered.

The girl and the boy chase the clockwork butterfly all over the ruins of Bervenia. There is treasure to be pilfered but today that is not important.

Today patience is rewarded, today the chrysalis opened and the boy has become a butterfly.

The girl discovers that she has always chased this particular butterfly and she thinks that she always will.

Because this particular butterfly, unlike all the others, will not break.


End file.
